Psychology; Education

March 1993

In chapter 1, the discussion is focussed on the underlying reason for the introduction of the education programme for the gifted in Malaysia and the need to undertake this study. The review of literature on the concept of giftedness, procedures and the measures used to identify intellectually gifted is presented in chapter 2.Almost all measures used to identify intellectually gifted have been developed in the USA and the UK, so,they have had to be translated to Malay and pretested. Thus, in chapter 3, the stability and to some extend the validity of the Malay version of these measures are presented. The Malay version measures are found to have similar ability as the original version.Since the criterion of intellectual giftedness is high IQ, an individual intelligence test has to be administered and this will limit the number and the representativeness of the sample. The possibility of screening the&nbsp; respondents and the procedure used to collect the data is detailed in chapter 4. The descriptive statistics that served as a basis for further analyses are presented in chapter 5.The effectiveness of the current or conventional procedure of using a grade from a public achievement test and categorization of test score is evaluated in chapter 6. Having found that the conventional procedure is not effective, multiple regression and discriminant function analyses are conducted to find the predictor(s) of giftedness and its the effectiveness especially in term of reducing false positives and false negatives. On the basis of these findings, presented in Chapter 7, a multi-stage procedure of identifying intellectually gifted Malay children can be developed by education authorities in Malaysia.In chapter 8, the main findings of the study is summarized and the establishment of longitudinal validation study is proposed.